I've been reading this forum, alot, regarding the problems most people have had with ZA 10 and vsmon.exe utilizing high volumes of CPU. Mainly because I also was having the same problem.

I tried the mod Fax's suggestion four times and still had the same problem. So rather than doing a clean uninstall of ZA and removing programs and applications that conflicted with ZA and its components, I opted to use the XP Pro CD and reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS. After installing SP3, and updating and patching all of MS's components, I installed ZA 10.1.065.000, and guess what?

It still hijacked my CPU making that machine totally unresponsive.

No, I didn't change any of ZA's default settings.

No, I did not let MS install its own anti-spyware apps.

But on uninstalling ZA 10, and reinstalling 9.3.037.000, ZoneAlarm behaves normally. No High-CPU utilization. It runs normally and I can use my computer now.

Now, on this new system, VSMON.exe does not utilize all the CPU. Rather ZA uses ALL the RAM, with the exception of 400Meg. Someone help me with the math here, but that looks something like 4% remaining RAM.

So I reboot the computer, and on returning to the desktop, ZA looks fine, but I notice the RAM utilization is slowly increasing. After an hour ZA has again taken all my RAM. Only this time I turn off ZA (exit), and after approximately 5 minutes, all but 1.4G of RAM is released. So I turn ZA back on, and again slowly my RAM utilization starts increasing until again after an hour its all used up.

My question is, is there any kind of tweeking I can do to get ZA to STOP using all my RAM (on my new machine), and to STOP using all my CPU on my older XP Pro machines (assuming I still want the headache of reinstalling and running V10)?

January 20th, 2012

fax

Re: ZA Extreme 10.1.065 on windows XP and WIN7: High CPU usage

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darrell Kitchen

After an hour ZA has again taken all my RAM. Only this time I turn off ZA (exit), and after approximately 5 minutes, all but 1.4G of RAM is released. So I turn ZA back on, and again slowly my RAM utilization starts increasing until again after an hour its all used up.

What else other then ZA is running on the WIN7 machine? Is Win7 been provided by the producer of the PC? Or clean Microsoft disk? What else did you installed after ZA? P2P? Torrent? Java based uploading/downloading? Which type of connection do you have? Connecting via a router? Modem? Are you using any specific software to connect provided by your ISP, card producer, router producer, modem producer, etc?

Sounds like a local issues? May be an hardware issue? There must be a network activity for ZA slowly eating RAM. What is communicating to the internet?

Btw, we are at ZA 10.1.079. First thing you should do is to go to "Uninstall a program", Remove ZA, Install the latest version and do not by any means restore any ZA settings or files. Leave it as default.

Which type of connection do you have? Connecting via a router? Modem? Are you using any specific software to connect provided by your ISP, card producer, roter producer, modem producer, etc?

My question is this, regarding the above, what does external devices that have no specific software installed on my computer have to do with the software running on my computer.

I have two Gigabit Network cards (1-Intel, 1-Linksys) on the computer itself (teamed), connected to an 8-port Gigabit switch (Linksys), wired directly to a Gigabit wireless ethernet router (Linksys). The only software installed on these are the two NICs, and they are up-to-date.

Quote:

Sounds like a local issues? May be an hardware issue? There must be a network activity for ZA slowly eating RAM. What is communicating to the internet?

At first, "What is communicating to the internet?" was my first mental question, but on examining internet activity, there is none. However there is ALOT of disk accessing going on, and WTM is not showing me which programs are doing this. Only that I notice that when I exit ZA, this disk access stops and there is no scheduled scanning in progress.

Quote:

Btw, we are at ZA 10.1.079. First thing you should do is to go to "Uninstall a program", Remove ZA, Install the latest version and do not by any means restore any ZA settings or files. Leave it as default.

...

January 20th, 2012

fax

Re: ZA Extreme 10.1.065 on windows XP and WIN7: High CPU usage

Well, then you have not started really on a clean board. If you are willing to troubleshoot the issue you will need to start from scratch. i.e. reformat, clean windows 7 installation + WIN7 updates only and latest ZA. Then test ZA behaviour. Looking for the latest version?

No linksys software please. Also what you mean exactly by "The only software installed on these are the two NICs". Which kind of software? Can you avoid to install for the above mentioned test?

If you can't follow the above mentioned root that may or may not help, the next step is to go via official ZA support (we are all users here). You can start from here:

Here is the Forum Moderators OFFICIAL responce to the VSmon.exe issue..

Quote:

Re: "vsmon" using 40-50% of the CPU all the time

Running applications that keep a constant internet connection open will create extra cycles to be used for ZA. Your basically constantly pushing data through ZA that it has to analyze so there will be more resources used and 50% and more is not unusual with these types of applications.

Its always been this way with ZA its just how the ZA core technology works and it nothing that can be changed or fixed because its working as designed.

Best advise don't run these kinds of apps all the time.

Forum Moderator

January 20th, 2012

Darrell Kitchen

Re: ZA Extreme 10.1.065 on windows XP and WIN7: High CPU usage

On talking with Tech Support, it has been determined that Windows 7 System management was causing the problem.

Both pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys had split the remaining drive space so that ZA did not have enough space to work with so it started filling up my RAM.

On removing the hiberfil.sys and resetting pagefile.sys to a specific size rather than system-managed, it (ZA) stopped taking over my RAM.

Thank you for suggesting that I check my drive space first. It helped ... ALOT.

Consider this closed ...

January 20th, 2012

fax

Re: ZA Extreme 10.1.065 on windows XP and WIN7: High CPU usage

Glad to hear ZA support could resolve your issue. Finally you followed the suggestions and it did pay back ;)

I wonder why and how can it happen on a "barebones" system. Anyway, revising the thread title to hint to the solution and closing it.